Still/Life presents three films by artist Rebecca Baron that explore still photography and its relationship to the moving image. In okay bye-bye (1998, 39 min), Baron’s chance discovery of a fragment of Super 8 film found on a sidewalk in San Diego, leads her to reckon with the history of Cambodia from the vantage point of southern California. Detour de Force (2014, 29 min) explores the incredible world of Ted Serios, a charismatic Chicago bell hop who, in the mid-1960’s produced hundreds of Polaroid images from his mind. Photographs of the final moments of three polar explorers from over a century ago are presented in The Idea of North (1995, 14 min), which investigates “the limitations of images… as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph”.
okay bye-bye
Rebecca Baron
1998 / US / 39 minutes / 16mm > digital file
In okay bye-bye, so named for what Cambodian children shouted to the U.S. ambassador in 1975 as he took the last helicopter out of Phnom Penh in advance of the Khmer Rouge, Rebecca Baron explores the relationship of history to memory. She questions whether, “image and memory can occupy the same space.” Building on excerpts from letters, found super-8 footage of an unidentified Cambodian man, iconographic photographs from the Vietnam War and other partial images, Baron combines epistolary narrative, memoir, journalism, and official histories to question whether something as monumental as the genocidal slaughter of Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime can be examined effectively with traditional methodologies.
Detour de Force
Rebecca Baron
2014 / US / Austria / 29 minutes / HD digital file
Detour de Force presents the world of “thoughtographer” Ted Serios, a charismatic Chicago bell hop who, in the mid-1960’s produced hundreds of Polaroid images from his mind. Constructed from 16mm documentation of Serios’s sessions and audio recordings of Serios speaking with Dr. Jule Eisenbud, the Denver psychiatrist who championed his abilities, the film is more ethnography than biography, portraying the social and scientific environments in which Serios thrived. The film foregrounds the state of image and sound recording technologies of the period as essential to the emergence of Serios’s psychic photography. It is also a document of the filmmaker’s encounters with the archival materials themselves.
The Idea of North
Rebecca Baron
1995 / US / 14 minutes / 16mm > digital file
In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron’s film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron’s words, “meaning is set adrift”.
Rebecca Baron is a Los Angeles-based media artist known for her lyrical essay films which explore the construction of history, with a particular interest in still photography and its relationship to the moving image.
Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and media venues including documenta 12, the Austrian Film Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Toronto Film Festival, London Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty Film Seminar, Viennale and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films have received awards at the San Francisco, Black Maria, Montreal, Leipzig, Athens, Onion City, KIN, Sinking Creek and Ann Arbor Film Festivals. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has taught documentary and experimental film at Massachusetts College of Art, Harvard University, and since 2000 at California Institute of the Arts.
Image credits:
Still from okay bye-bye (1998, 16mm, 39 min) directed by Rebecca Baron
Still from Detour de Force (2014, HD digital video, 29 min) directed by Rebecca Baron
Still from The Idea of North (1995, 16mm, 14 min) directed by Rebecca Baron